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also, if memory serves, they were caught up in a fake pricing scandal of things they sold as well.

In addition, back when I lived in Berkeley, in the early days of Whole Foods, they took over a Co-Op grocery store on the corner of Telegraph and Ashby (the real co-op kind, the hippie, lefty model) and promptly started union busting (speak of the irony!), leading to several years of organized boycotts against them...it always left an unsavory taste in my mouth must say, though I've gotten over it and do frequent them from time to time.

Yeah, sadly corporate America is nothing but a dishonest and abusive machine. I have refused to do business with companies that treat me with a lack of decency. I realize they are all the same but I only boycott ones that have harmed me personally. Among them: McDonalds, Comcast (the worst), ATT, Dicks Sporting Goods, Best Buy, and there are others. I only buy a few things at Whole Foods. I have become very specific about how I spend my money. I figure it is a responsibility we al should take on but all I can do is my part. I do try to convince people I know to stop purchasing any company I have had an issue with and when my friends have issues I do the same for them.

I think everything balances out in some way, and truthiness and verisimilitude have always been paragons of virtue and will remain so, despite what appears to be it being in the wane.

I just think we're in a different epoch, where information, and access to it is at an all time high, and we're sifting through and dealing with its various machinations...we shouldn't be too concerned, in due time all the nutjobs and wackos will be put in their place, at least I hope so...

]The artificial food products are popular with restaurants to display menu choices as they always look fresh and never rot. Artificial rice is made of PVC, a white, brittle plastic. "Even a child can tell it is plastic by the weight and feel.”

Wouldn't display rice be trying to look like cooked rice and not raw rice? Why would 'investigators' try to cook cooked rice? How many displays are there that they need 2.5 metric tonnes of the stuff? What happened to using photos of the food for display? Why is nobody trying to pass off the fake pizza and fake sushi the same companies make?

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He said he was puzzled why anyone would smuggle artificial rice to sell as real in Africa, as the product his company sold cost more than 70 yuan for 1kg, or 10 times the price of real rice in China. In Africa the cost would increase due to shipping and other costs.

That's the kicker for me.

On the Credible Motives front, we are getting into Bond Villain territory here. 70 yuan is about $10. It's hard to believe that evildoers would go to all that trouble to take a $25,000 loss for the "opportunity" of poisoning the innocent. Most bad guys do bad stuff to make money. Not to lose money.

saying this is the easy way out, it saves you from having to think, having to consider your sources, having to sort reasonableness from bulls#!t, from having some background of science, politics, geography, medicine, economics, to draw from.

for example, either some of the rice you are about to eat is "poisonous fake rice" or it is not. If you are about to eat that rice, it actually matters which one is true. One new age-y "health" site warns you about the imminent dangers and one "lamestream" media site says it is a hoax.

They cannot both be lying. Nor can they both be merely "incorrect".

let's say fake rice is a hoax but you don't believe it is because you believe the debunkers are "lying". They are getting paid off from Big Rice. Your illness may be psychosomatic from thinking about fake rice made from plastic bags, but you also may be genuinely ill - from something else.

You delay treatment because you think you know why you are sick. You stop eating rice, but you don't get better. Not to decide is to decide. You can throw up your hands and pretend "they're all the same", but there are often real consequences for not sorting out truth from fiction.

It is not worth my while to verify every bit of misinformation. I never heard the fake rice story until I saw it here. Without verifying it I am pretty sure the story is fake, as it does not make sense. ALL the news is just global gossip at best. So boom period had no effect on me personally, neither did the recession. I do not borrow money. I grow my food. Now that people in IT steal my music, I sell it directly. Hence, not engaging with news and other bull, leaves me laughing at those who do, same as I laugh at conspiracy theories and multitude of idiots too lazy to check facts when necessary. We have more choices than ever and more freedom than ever, believe me.

Interesting that you put news consumption in the same category as drug addiction. Perhaps it is. Let me assure you most of my friends do not have a TV, do not listen to the news on radio and do not read papers. They all seem to be perfectly OK.
You did not comment on last part of my post: News is entertainment and it is all fake. To expand a little, even the best journalist who is present at the scene with best intentions to be honest sees only on tiny piece of the picture. Most are NOT at the scene, are often thousands of miles away (as in the report from our special correspondent from Buenos Aires, while he is sitting with me in Ireland, gets a bonus for this). Add to this the essential need to sell copies, keep the ratings and so on, and you have a pack of lies streaming at you constantly. Global gossip at best.

Its not all fake, but it is all misleading and it is propaganda, sometimes by willful intent and sometimes by ignorance (as you said). Usually there is a grain of truth, maybe a really small grain in the actual article, but also usually the headlines are out and out lies.

My wife and I take turns with news stories by trying to determine what was not said that should have been said if the headline/story were really true. This thought process usually accurately predicts the BS factor in a news story. Our friends that have been totally indoctrinated don't get how we can immediately dismiss a news story based on this line of though. I guess we just trust common sense (which is not so common anymore.)

This whole 'no one knows the whole truth so you can't trust anyone or anything' trope strikes me as just a pathetic excuse for what is actually inexcusable intellectual laziness.

No doubt the following thoughtful -- if exasperated -- essay will be too long for many to read -- and I fully understand some here will stop reading as soon as they realize it challenges their way of thinking -- but I'm going to post it anyway.

This whole 'no one knows the whole truth so you can't trust anyone or anything' trope strikes me as just a pathetic excuse for what is actually inexcusable intellectual laziness.

Bingo!

...though it may be me just getting older, but it seems people are getting more stupid, as I recall when I was younger there weren't tens of millions of people believing in the existence of lizard people...or maybe they were just dormant (and I don't mean the lizard people! ), who knows?

This whole 'no one knows the whole truth so you can't trust anyone or anything' trope strikes me as just a pathetic excuse for what is actually inexcusable intellectual laziness.

I totally agree with this.

Most of the real evil in this world is happening right there on the front page. But the ones who might be most capable of resisting, are patting themselves on the back for their faux "deeper" knowledge - which primarily consists of the idea that

whatever it is, it's really something else

without the unpleasant necessity of really knowing what that "something else" is. Or even worse, they become those people who will believe any wild and crazy thing as long as it is wild and crazy. As long as it's "anti", then it's true.

Quote:

No doubt the following thoughtful -- if exasperated -- essay will be too long for many to read -- and I fully understand some here will stop reading as soon as they realize it challenges their way of thinking -- but I'm going to post it anyway.

Most of the real evil in this world is happening right there on the front page. But the ones who might be most capable of resisting, are patting themselves on the back for their faux "deeper" knowledge - which primarily consists of the idea that

whatever it is, it's really something else

without the unpleasant necessity of really knowing what that "something else" is. Or even worse, they become those people who will believe any wild and crazy thing as long as it is wild and crazy. As long as it's "anti", then it's true.

excellent, thank you

I don't think the author, Tom Nichols, is particularly good at persuasive writing -- academics and experts are not, nor should they be, editorialists or pamphleteers -- and it's a bit of a rant, actually, however well-reasoned...

But it raises a lot of points that I think we -- the global culture -- need to discuss seriously -- and rationally.

Fake race = Pastina .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastina I could see how some idiot could accidentally have bought Pastina when they expected rice. Not the same, but not the end of the world.

Fake news = nothing new. People outside the USA understand very well that Americans mainly get news that is extremely controlled and represents what the handful of owners of the media giants wish you to see. And I am under no illusion that our own news is worthless - but at least we get a vairety of distorted agendas down here.

Infotainment = Cheap news. 'News' providers can't be bothered paying for real reporters out in the field, digging up real news. Too expensive. Much easier to use stock library footage, and green screen some actors. There are plenty of utube clips where people expose major TV news companies for using the SAME ACTORS in breaking news stories. Some of these stories are about serious bombings and other scare tactics - which makes us question how many of those stories are real. Control.

I remember watching in "shock and awe" about the Gulf War in the 90's. !0 years on, Clinton admitted it was a hoax and they used fabricated video. Those movies like Wag The Dog ... preparing us to accept fake news.

Please read "The Art of War" ... it's thousands of years old, but it is THE document that successful military leaders read and study. War requires massive deceit - you have to lie about absolutely everything. The enemy must be totally confused - and that is a lot harder than you think. Helps if the general public are completely confused too.

News can be put through tripple filter (allegedly by Socrates):
filter one: is it true? mostly not, as even the most dedicated journalist only writes what he/she heard, and such evidence would not pass the first questioning in the court of law.
filter two: is it good? as most of it is not, as it is presented, I am not interested. Exceptions being scientific achievements, discoveries and similar.
filter three: is it useful to me? mostly not. I have not noticed any effect on my vegetable garden or sound of my DAW or my instruments whatever the latest alleged scandal in politics is supposed to be.

<snip - leave out the politics!>
This thread was funny in the beginning, but than I realized some people here take it seriously, which turned it a little sad. Not as desperate as Paul is dead again thread. Thankfully.

Fake news = nothing new. People outside the USA understand very well that Americans mainly get news that is extremely controlled and represents what the handful of owners of the media giants wish you to see. And I am under no illusion that our own news is worthless - but at least we get a vairety of distorted agendas down here.

fake news has a very specific meaning, a meaning which is becoming lost as people use the expression as an epithet to discredit their opponent's propaganda.

Fake news is specifically hoax news. Completely made-up stories. The primary driving force of fake news is to gather clicks and shares, hence the over-the-top clickbait headlines. They also have deliberately deceptive practices. For example: ABCnews dot com dot co is a fake news site that has "ABC news" in its name. It uses a logo that is indistinguishable from the actual ABC news logo to further convince people that they are reading "ABC news"'s website.

Spin, propaganda and monopolistic mass media controlled news are separate issues IMO, although people who don't like a given story will nowadays push back on it by calling it 'fake news'. Even when the story is actually true or merely has a 'spin' they don't like.

the flip side of this is the ever-increasing credulousness of larger and larger segments of the population. Stories that formerly would not pass muster as a high-school rumor or a chain-letter now gain popular currency among millions. Entire websites exist as profit-making machines for their owners by posting for example, anti-vaxxer stories. Long after the information has been discredited an entire community (and an entire industry) has grown up around this or that particular conspiracy theory.

At some level if you can control the narrative, you can control the reality. It finally breaks down at the physical reality of course. But meanwhile the profits have been pocketed. The tobacco companies successfully gained at least 10 years of unregulated sales with their campaign to discredit the research on cancer and cigarettes.

The extraction industries are doing the same now with their well-funded stories about how climate change is a "hoax". The hoaxers crying "hoax"! Eventually the ice WILL melt, but right now the smokestacks can keep belching because there is 'doubt' in the public mind.

I think "fake news" is pot calling kettle black. Big news has got caught with it's pants down so many times that they are now intimidated by the scores of "truthers" who are exposing them and trying to fill the hole in the market that has been left by these major leaque bullsh!ters. But this is the age of Info Wars, and it really is war.

Trouble is - truth can be stranger than fiction. The old war criminals discovered propaganda, and those techniques (of repeatedly telling bold lies) has never gone away. Much of what we believe is just repeated nonsense.

I think "fake news" is pot calling kettle black. Big news has got caught with it's pants down so many times that they are now intimidated by the scores of "truthers" who are exposing them and trying to fill the hole in the market that has been left by these major leaque bullsh!ters. But this is the age of Info Wars, and it really is war.

Trouble is - truth can be stranger than fiction. The old war criminals discovered propaganda, and those techniques (of repeatedly telling bold lies) has never gone away. Much of what we believe is just repeated nonsense.

Yeah but you still can't hold a candle to a site that goes out of its way to imitate with copycat url and logo one of those very same mainstream sites. It surely puts it into perspective. There is also a NY Times dot "co" and many others.

This is true'fake news' and no matter how much we may be wrestling over the control of the narrative - my slant vs your slant - we should all be making that critical distinction between those who are 'unreliable' and those who are lying. Those whose posts should be viewed with skepticism and those whose posts should not be given the satisfaction of being viewed at all.

There is a big gap between those who give their conflicting biases to their reports of a specific event and those who report events that never even occurred.

I still say the lizard people thing is somewhat unique, aside from all the fake news conjecture.

A new bar is set...perhaps equal to the notion every species known to humanity was preserved due to a pair being housed in an enormous ark during a wretched storm.
Or that an orange thingy is the paragon of leadership.

What is the bigger 'fake' - the obvious fake, or the mainstream news who claim to be reporting truth but are actually corrupt and manufacturing false news?

I have no patience for fakers - which is why the whole thing is so annoying. I have no idea what kind of idiot would want to post stuff they know to be false. BUT - maybe they are doing us a favour? Because without this nonsense, we honest people do find ourselves sort of trusting official looking sites.

The message is clear - trust no one.

The best we can do is get ideas from as many sources as possible - I like to study both sides of a case. Quite often the motivation behind the sources become clear. Politics, religion, business ... there is usually an angle which becomes clear.

Sometimes it's just kids who clearly have nothing to do with their pathetic lives. But the worrying ones are the ones that seem to be well funded and prolific. That suggests an organised campaign with a purpose. Confuse and distract ... sometimes I wonder if this is some sort of IQ test ... because some of the prolific sites would appear to be only of interest to dribbling idiot ...

Certainly anything to do with war or money or oil I don't believe a single word of. Fear mongering 101.

I still say the lizard people thing is somewhat unique, aside from all the fake news conjecture.

A new bar is set...perhaps equal to the notion every species known to humanity was preserved due to a pair being housed in an enormous ark during a wretched storm.
Or that an orange thingy is the paragon of leadership.

But it does make me wonder about something potentially very sinister. Google pretty much own information. Anytime we want to check a fact, we tend to say "let me Google that". As far as I'm concerned, Google is in bed with NASA and the military. Our computers and devices are clearly able to spy on us, and that technology has to be controlled by the military (for our own protection - I don't mind). But there is more than one military ... this is where it gets worrying. Where are our devices made? The back doors to our devices - who were the engineers loyal to?

The more clever the super power is, the less obivous it will be that they have control over our devices. Is it Uncle Sam? Or maybe the Russians? Far more likely the Chinese - or Israel ... who is cleverest in this war?

But as far as the Mandella Effect ... Google (or any clever/rich hackers) are in a position of re-writing history, should they want to. So with gullible smucks being guided into thinking that CERN or whatever can really firk with Time itself ... any Super Power could literally re-write history. Take for example the assassination of Kennedy - these is so much noise about this that people don't even know if the car had two or three seats. So everyone uses Google to find out the "truth" .... but Google could (if they wanted to) find every image relating to this and replace it with a photoshopped image.

They really could make the Mandella Effect come "true" - in the minds of people who trust a Google search anyway. Far fetched? I think that would be child's play to them ...

Read the Art of War. Also read the story of World War ii. That war was won by extreme deception using every available technology - including technology the public did not learn about until decades later. Pulse Code Modulation, digital computing techniques, vocoders ... all that stuff helped to win that war. Imagine what the boys and girls are playing with now ...

Most of the time, TV news stories have to be jammed into so little time that telling both sides of a story is impossible.

Interesting bit of human nature, in that we have a habit of seeing only two values - right/wrong, left/right, yes/no, truth/lie.

Perhaps this has more to do with the duality of man, more than anything else, and the 'both sides' notion merely obscures the larger picture that there may only be one 'fact', and that anything else beside that is fake?